Thematic Associations Research Articles

Langland’s Alliterative Line(s)

Alliteration in Piers Plowman, although a required prosodic feature used to mark metrically realized stresses, has a variety of other forms and functions both within and beyond the line unit. Langland evidently deployed alliteration with extraordinary versatility as an optional rhetorical device, reducing, expanding, compacting, muting, and compounding alliterative collocations in the line while also using it to link adjacent lines in manifold ways, often coordinating his intra- and interlinear alliterations so as to mark expansive and complex thematic associations. Taking Schmidt’s authorized line types as an initial framework but disputing some of its assumptions, this study surveys alliterative forms within, between, and among lines. It proposes a new taxonomy of interlinear alliterative forms: along with the well-recognized phenomena of running and translinear alliteration, eight other interlinear patterns enable discrete varieties of repetition, anticipation, and echo.

Color Concepts and Their Organization in the Case of Blind Children

The relation between color cognition and color terms is a popular issue in the domain of language cognition. Until now, three theories have emerged: (1) the general evaluation theory of color terms, which asserts that color terms and color cognition are independent; (2) the hypothesis of linguistic reality, which declares that color terms affect color cognition; and (3) a compromised view, which integrates the previous two views. Almost all earlier studies have been conducted on sighted subjects. The dearth of studies on blind people could possibly be explained by people's belief that the blind cannot see colors. Using the methods of testing of color concepts and classification of color words, this study investigated the understanding and organization of the color words of blind children. The materials were 11 basic Chinese color terms: black, white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, palm, grey, and pink. The color terms were printed on cards, using Braille. The subjects were 85 blind children, out of which 63 were born blind and 22 were turned blind after birth. Further, 55 of the subjects were primary school pupils, and 30 were middle school pupils. The experiment involved two stages: In the first stage, the subjects were asked to name colors by touching the cards on which the Braille color words were printed and to provide some examples with regard to that color from their daily life; in the second stage, they were asked to sort the color cards into groups according to their own standards. The results were as follows. First, the order of the color concepts that the blind children got through in the test were similar to the order of the color naming by the sighted children; however there also existed differences. Second, in the semantic spaces of the color words, both the blind and sighted children manifested "colorness/colorlessness" dimensions; while the sighted children manifested the "cold color/warm color" dimension, the blind children manifested the "things' color/setting color" dimension. Third, the organization of the blind children's color concepts was characterized by thematic associations and slot-filler associations, these kinds of relations being based on the individuals' knowledge and experience, thereby emphasizing the functions of things, contexts, and the relations of events. The findings of the study were as follows: (1) there were similarities as well as differences between the order of the color concepts that the blind children got through in the test and the order of the color naming by the sighted children, and (2) the blind children manifested the "colorness/colorlessness" and "things' color/setting color" dimensions in their semantic space of color words, and the organization of the color concepts of blind children was characterized by thematic associations and slot-filler associations.

White Supremacists, Oppositional Culture and the World Wide Web

Over the previous decade, white supremacist organizations have tapped into the ever emerging possibilities offered by the World Wide Web. Drawing from prior sociological work that has examined this medium and its uses by white supremacist organizations, this article advances the understanding of recruitment, identity and action by providing a synthesis of interpretive and more systematic analyses of thematic content, structure and associations within white supremacist discourse. Analyses, which rely on TextAnalyst, highlight semantic networks of thematic content from principal white supremacist websites, and delineate patterns and thematic associations relative to the three requisites of social movement culture denoted in recent research - namely identity, interpretational framing of cause and effect, and political efficacy. Our results suggest that nationalism, religion and definitions of responsible citizenship are interwoven with race to create a sense of collective identity for these groups, their members and potential recruits. Moreover, interpretative frameworks that simultaneously identify threatening social issues and provide corresponding recommendations for social action are employed. Importantly, and relative to prior work, results show how the interpretation of problems, their alleged causes and the call to action are systematically linked. We conclude by discussing the framing of white supremacy issues, the organizations' potential for recruitment, and how a relatively new communication medium, the Internet, has been cheaply and efficiently integrated into the white supremacist repertoire. Broader implications for social movement theory are also explored.

The Letter of Aristeas: A New Exodus Story?

AbstractA common opinion views the purpose of the Letter of Aristeas as strengthening the self-identity of Egyptian Diaspora Jewry by sanctifying the Greek translation of the Torah. As Orlinsky has shown, this view is supported by linguistic and thematic parallels between Aristeas and biblical descriptions of the giving of the Torah. The linguistic and thematic associations, however, do not only apply to this specific biblical episode, but also to the entire book of Exodus including the exodus story itself. The author of Aristeas transformed the biblical stories of the exodus and the giving of the Torah into a new foundation story of Egyptian Jewry. In doing so, the new story disregards the biblical hostility to Egypt and instead expresses sympathy for the Ptolemaic king who released the Jews from slavery, settled them in Egypt and initiated the Torah translation into Greek. The aim of Aristeas was to offer a religious justification for the residence of Jews in Egypt.

The Politics of a Country Culture

The Politics of a Country Culture

The development of Russian verse: meter and its meanings

Michael Wachtel. The Development of Russian Verse: Meter and its Meanings. Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature. Cambridge University Press, 1998. xii + 323 pages. Notes, Bibliography, Index.The classical notion that individual verse metres are destined for particular poetic uses is taken up and renovated in Michael Wachtel's ambitious book. As Joseph Brodsky put it in an essay on Mandelstam: Meters in themselves are kinds of for which nothing can be substituted. They cannot be replaced even by each other, let alone by free In his translation of Tristia into English iambic pentameter Brodsky demonstrated, perhaps inadvertently, that these spiritual magnitudes do not necessarily survive translation from one language to another even when metre is scrupulously reproduced.Wachtel argues that particular metres acquire indelible thematic associations that recur in subsequent uses of form. Part of what makes metres distinctive is accumulated tradition of poems that have employed them. As Wachtel points out, Russian poets have always expected their readers to hear and understand historical echoes of metrical tradition they work within. Anyone who has read widely in a poetic tradition will find these assertions unarguable, and extent to which author labours his point may reflect fact that book began life as teaching materials for a graduate seminar. Wachtel's introduction gives several astute examples, including parodies and limericks, of ways in which metres can acquire thematic reminiscences in an experienced reader's mind.In tracing semantic aura around verse metres Wachtel owes a large and generously acknowledged debt to work of Mikhail Gasparov, Kiril Taranovskii and others, although for purposes of a teaching book he has sensibly narrowed his focus to representative poems in five forms that have quite distinct profiles.Pushkin's Chernaia shal (The Black Shawl), inspired by Zhukovsky's version of Uhland's Revenge, is seen as direct source of a series of ballad-like poems in amphibrachic tetrameter couplets with masculine rhyme in which recur motifs of passionate love, betrayal, and revenge. Despite contending influences of other German ballads, Pushkin's version became canonical, and Wachtel convincingly traces its influence through Aksakov, Del'vig, Lermontov, and finds it still detectable in Akhmatova's Seroglazyi korol (Grey-eyed King), even though by this time amphibrachs have been replaced by dactyls. Not surprisingly, distinctly melodramatic original gave rise to parodies as well, which may work even better than serious poems to fix thematic associations. So pungent was original example that we find whiffs of it even in Kruchenykh's Razboinik Van'ka Kain and even more recently in Dmitri Prigov.A chapter on the blank verse lyric considers influence of Pushkin's ...vnov' ia posetil on subsequent meditations in iambic pentameter blank verse. Sidestepping question of blank verse in dramatic writing, Wachtel makes a good case that an entire tradition has arisen from Pushkin's example. No one familiar with powerful original would be surprised to learn that it has left an indelible imprint on subsequent works in form, as Wachtel demonstrates with examples from Apollon Grigoriev, Blok, Gumilev, Khodasevich and Brodsky, emigres Dovid Knut and Vera Bulich, and concluding with Akhmatova's Severnye elegii. Among persistent motifs are a return (figurative or literal) to a home or building, and a meditation on time passing and change of generations. Wachtel's perceptive and informed readings of these poems are best part of book. At certain points one wonders why he goes to such lengths to avoid word elegiac, which encapsulates handily certain features and tonalities of these blank verse lyrics, but he may be trying to avoid muddying terminological waters of a later chapter on elegiac couplet. …

Children's Knowledge of Thematic and Taxonomic Relations at Two Years of Age

An interesting conflict exists in the developmental literature concerning the strength of thematic versus taxonomic associations. "Dog-doghouse" is a thematic match, while "dog-horse" is a taxonomic match. This study compared the ability of children to identify both types of associations at 2 points during the third year of life: 26 months (N = 15) and 34 months (N = 24). A reinforced match-to-sample technique was used in which half of the matches were thematic and the other half were taxonomic. Both age groups were able to identify thematic matches, although children near 3 years of age were able to recognize a wider range of thematic associations than children near 2 years of age. The 26-month-olds were unable to identify taxonomic matches that had no perceptual basis, but the 34-month-olds were successful at this task; the 34-month-olds appeared to have a more general understanding of categories that was less tied to perceptual features.

Children's Knowledge of Thematic and Taxonomic Relations at Two Years of Age

An interesting conflict exists in the developmental literature concerning the strength of thematic versus taxonomic associations. "Dog-doghouse" is a thematic match, while "dog-horse" is a taxonomic match. This study compared the ability of children to identify both types of associations at 2 points during the third year of life: 26 months (N = 15) and 34 months (N = 24). A reinforced match-to-sample technique was used in which half of the matches were thematic and the other half were taxonomic. Both age groups were able to identify thematic matches, although children near 3 years of age were able to recognize a wider range of thematic associations than children near 2 years of age. The 26-month-olds were unable to identify taxonomic matches that had no perceptual basis, but the 34-month-olds were successful at this task; the 34-month-olds appeared to have a more general understanding of categories that was less tied to perceptual features.

Thematic Form and the Genesis of Schoenberg's D-Minor Quartet, Opus 7

Schoenberg's D-minor Quartet, Opus 7, is distinctive for fusing elements of sonata and four-movement form into an immense fifty-minute work that coheres primarily by thematic processes and relationships. The numerous sketches for the quartet reveal that the task of achieving both thematic continuity on such a scale and adequate contrast between sections challenged even the normally rapid and "spontaneous" composer, who had to stop at certain points to revise his compositional strategy. Schoenberg resorted at these points to groups of brief concept sketches to work out the thematic associations and their eventual ordering and placement in the larger formal design.